


light swells (in a distant space)

by unwoundfloors



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-04
Updated: 2011-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-25 16:38:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwoundfloors/pseuds/unwoundfloors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things, he thinks, are better left alone. (Spoilers for 10x06.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	light swells (in a distant space)

Many are the nights that Harry awakes from the same dream.

London is in ruins, torn to shreds. He’s never certain why, but the relevance of it escapes him. A gentle wind tears through the streets, doing nothing to dispel the dense, claustrophobic heat of twilight. A orange glow bleeds into the melancholy of a sky, deep purple like a bruise, the sound of sirens faint in the distance somewhere. Ruth is always one step ahead of him, a luminous figure hiding in the dissipating light of day - only just out of reach.  It is almost frightening, how little the idea of Armageddon’s arrival does not move him.

“You’re a born spook, Ruth,” she repeats to him, with a half-smile, wind blowing her skirt around her ankles.

How true that was, he thought, remembering the carefully-lettered names of each colleague on that glass wall in Thames House. “One of the best.”

She stops. “Don’t think about this too often,” she says, her grey eyes serious, shoulders set. He feels torn, somewhere between confused and elated and utterly anguished, knowing full well that this had been doomed from the beginning. She reaches out, running her fingers gently along the curve of his jaw. “There’ll always be something else, Harry.”

He wakes up, intensely conscious of the way it had felt to touch her, his mouth slanted against hers, that one last time before being led away by CIA officers into extradition, ready to surrender to fate.  His time was up. How futile had things seemed. How none of that seemed to matter, with her so close to him.

 

 

Going back to work, surprisingly, had not been the struggle that the Home Secretary and the rest of his team had assumed it would be. A piece of him had wanted to turn away from the service forever, to take his retirement and run, far away from the perpetual hum and urgency of Thames House.

But then, what would he do without the service, he wonders.  It seemed rather selfish to have watched all of his colleagues sacrifice their lives in the line of duty, only to surrender when it all became too much. _I’ve never heard you feel sorry for yourself. This isn’t you talking._ Ruth would have been displeased.

He answers the telephone. He considers files and surveillance photographs spread before him in his lonely office; he struggles to comprehend the sheer incompetence and self-servitude of politicians on a daily basis, and life goes on. _Regnum defende._ Whatever that meant any more.

By all reports, Tom Quinn had done an excellent job of dealing with Levrov. He didn’t particularly care, more preoccupied with wondering how Tom was faring these days, outside of MI5 - but still somewhere inside with an ear to the wall. After all, spies never retire, did they?

 

 

His officers are more careful around him, these days. Erin and Dimitri move through the Grid quietly, occasionally stopping in the middle of sentences gazing blankly at each other. Callum is more withdrawn, less frequent with the dry retorts, he observes. But they work well together, all efficiency and mutual equilibrium – he even sees Dimitri and Erin leave together one evening, hand in hand, and thinks, _finally._ He’d left his chance at happiness far, far behind – he prayed that his officers would not be foolish enough to make the same mistake he had.

 

 

“There will be a time to grieve, Ruth. I promise you, there will be time to grieve,” he remembers telling her, once, right before having to leave Danny’s funeral to answer the ringing of a mobile phone.  How empty those words had always been.

Drowned out by a terrorist explosion, the endless whirr of helicopters and the perpetually echoing call of national duty: Harry thinks of Sisyphus, condemned to rolling the boulder up the hill time after time, only to watch it roll back down again. He thinks of the little continental philosophy he’d read, way back when – Camus and the paradox of absurdity – and then remembers Ruth, and her peerless deconstruction of classical literature, finding her way into the heart of the Grid in the company of Homer and Shakespeare.

She’d probably be gently teasing him over how morose he was being, he thinks, smiling ruefully.

 

 

He makes an appointment to view the house in Suffolk by the coast. Predictably, just the sight of the dark green paint peeling from the door was enough to make him ache with regret. He walks out before the amiable blonde woman can show him beyond the kitchen. _I couldn’t picture myself living there without you._

Some things, he thinks, are better left alone.

 

 

From the rooftop of Thames House at eleven on a Friday evening London looks warm and peaceful, its streets and buildings’ lights dimmed. One last phone call needed to be made, before leaving Thames House and another week behind. He fingers the set of keys in his coat pocket, thinking of the way the glow of London below them had illuminated Ruth’s eyes, bright and resolute.

“We couldn’t be more together than we are now, Harry.”

He hates the idea of not being able to remember the shape of her pale face, the sound of her voice, low and determined. The memory of her is still sharp in his mind but he was living with too many ghosts. Adam, whose bravado and strength had crumbled as soon as that bullet hit Fiona’s chest. Ros, who had never done things in measures, who had never bothered with romance, married to the service instead – and six people had shown up to her funeral.

He was always learning things the hard way.

 

 

Nobody had come by Ruth’s flat to clean it out, yet. He flicked on the lightswitch in the hallway, flooding the loungeroom and kitchen with a dim yellow glow. It was spotless, and mostly empty – he knew she hadn’t spent much time at home, especially after returning home from Cyprus. Things had never really been the same.

He was not surprised to find a collection of novels and handwritten papers, stamped by Corpus Christi, still in her possession. He stops to thumb through one particularly eloquent piece on deception in Hamlet – admiring the faultless manner in which she deconstructed seemingly-innocuous details, weaving loose threads into one beautiful, cohesive whole. Articulate, self-assured. Even then, she’d had the markings of a genius.

In a small box, her charm necklace - the one he assumed she’d lost, along with a silver ring with a single ruby he remembered from their one dinner together.

The collection of books far outnumbered anything else in there. He picked up a copy of Plato’s _Apology_ , covered in notes. One sentence, underlined twice: "the difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death."

Socrates had been forced to drink hemlock and died for what he believed in, and had left none of his writings but an impression on his students that had inspired them for centuries to come. Ruth had thrown away her life in England, leaving on a barge on a cold winter morning for unknown places, so he could bring Mace and his group to justice; then taken the hit from Sasha again for him. He gazes out the window, watching the lights from traffic blur and run together. This, he realizes, was the only way things could be. _Something wonderful, that was never said._

He closes the book, tucking it away in his coat pocket, and stands up.


End file.
